What + Why
This project is part of the FY25-26 OKR: WE1.6 Task prioritization:
By the end of Q3, watchlist users can more easily organize their work and act more effectively on taking patrolling or editing action, as measured by qualitative feedback.
Watchlists and recent changes are powerful features, but too often the feed feels like an “overflowing inbox,” in spite of powerful tooling to manage them.
Core problems:
- Signal-to-noise issues. Users with large watchlists want better ways to manage and filter their watchlists, and warn users of watchlists that are too big.
- Performance issues: watchlists and recent changes are subject to Timeouts; for example, there were 127k slow queries in June-July 2025.
- Poor discoverability and UX. Many filters and “power tools” in Watchlist and recent changes exist, however users are not able to find or make use of them. Settings are also scattered across pages.
- Variance in signal efficacy: Editors are sometimes distrustful of ML-scored edit reviews, and have varying opinions on key data such as the usefulness of byte size.” As a workaround, editors feel a need to manually scan their watchlist.
- DIY task management. While Watchlist and Recent Changes are a starting point, advanced editors create their own workflows to manage tasks in and outside of the wikis.
- Unsuited for mobile. Users prefer the desktop view of Watchlist, even on mobile.
Creating and applying labels to watched pages can help experienced editors organize and filter for edits that interest them the most, or those that they need for a specific task.
Details
As an experienced editor with 100+ watched pages in my watchlist I want to create and apply labels to my watched pages so that I can better filter and keep track of edits that interest me.
Goals:
Metrics to watch and how this impacts the product
Research findings / data:
- Graphs of the number of pages watched across 4 wikis by editors and admins.
Designs:
Figma
Screen coming soon
Out of scope:
- A full redesign of the feed
- A full redesign of filtering UX
- Cross wiki data - implement anything that ingests multiple watchlists from various wikis.
- Out of scope for Milstrone 1:
- Having labels in the raw watchlist.
- Adding/removing labels from Special:Watchlist.
- Applying a color picker to watchlist labels.